


trade all my tomorrows (for just one yesterday)

by dilangley



Series: The Infinity of Us [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Croatoan/Endverse, Blow Job, Established Sexual Relationship, Follows the canon within the Endverse, M/M, Not a happy bit of writing, angsty smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-24
Updated: 2017-08-24
Packaged: 2018-12-19 13:24:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11898660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilangley/pseuds/dilangley
Summary: There's demons, Croats, and a devil wearing his brother's face, sowhat's left of Dean Winchester needs what's left of Castiel.This fic is part of theInfinity of Usseries. The series showcases might-have-beens between Dean and Castiel. All fics stand completely alone.





	trade all my tomorrows (for just one yesterday)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song "Just One Yesterday" by Fall Out Boy. It will forever be my favorite Endverse!Destiel song.

Dean slung his rifle down on the table and slammed the door shut behind him. Outside, he could still hear the steady drum of artillery fire, the unmistakable cadence of warfare, but the digital clock on the wall boasted 20:09; his quitting time was long overdue.

He couldn’t shed the layers of his day fast enough, dropping his jacket on the back of the chair, kicking his boots under the table, tossing his ammo belt beside the abandoned gun. With every item dropped, a little of the numbness slipped away. Through that door, he was nothing but a warrior. The team called him The Righteous Man, a tongue-in-cheek moniker but also a sign of their desperation. They needed something to believe in, and in a world without God, a good man had to be close enough.

“Cas?” He hollered the name, foolishly hoping to hear a reply, but nothing came. Castiel wasn’t here.

Dean took care of his needs with military precision, beginning with hydration and then moving on to canned rations. Tonight’s unlabeled tin produced beanie weenies. He flicked the light switch controlling the microwave experimentally, but the power grid had nothing to give him. He walked over and cut out the overhead light, switching on his flashlight instead. Even so, the microwave didn’t fire up. He ate the hot dogs and beans cold from the can.

His mind whirred and ticked, searching for anything to distract it from thoughts. His consciousness chased him, always trying to catch hold with long, icy fingers to drag him into despair. If life had slowed down for even a minute, he might have had to think about the gut-bending, soul-crushing pain he lugged around. Instead he just let bearing its weight make him strong. 

Even after all these years, he missed Sam in the quiet of the night. Tell a man his brother is the devil, let him see that his brother is the devil, and when push comes to shove, he would still risk Lucifer to see him one more time.

The key jangled in the lock outside, and Castiel staggered through the front door. The man paused to take bleary, blinking stock of Dean.

“Bad day, fearless leader?” Cas raised both eyebrows so they nearly touched his hairline, and his voice pitched up almost as high. 

“Not for us. Took out a whole colony of Croats, put three demons in lockdown. We saved lives today.” 

“You’ve still got blood on your hands,” Cas said, and Dean flinched. In his mind, he saw rear gunner Nathan fall, two demons plunging their fingernails into his eyeballs and gouging the tissue out of the sockets. He saw Sarah lying on the ground, wide-eyed and lifeless, throat ripped out by human teeth.

“Losses are inevitable,” he growled.

“No, Dean.” Castiel dropped himself into the chair across from him. His blue eyes were intent as he motioned. “I mean it. You’ve still got blood on your hands. You should shower.”

Dean looked down at his red and black knuckles, covered in blood busted through old scabs. He flipped his palms up and recognized the brighter red from holding Nathan in his final seconds, promising him he was going to a better place. That platitude was easy to offer these days; even oblivion, absolute obliteration, beat the hell out of right here.

“Yeah.” Dean sniffed the strange perfume of marijuana, body odor, and sex emanating from Castiel. “So should you.”

They set their bodies back into motion again, moving automatically. Castiel opened his own unidentified canned dinner while Dean took a shower, and then they switched, Dean taking up a place at the table and cleaning his rifle while Cas showered.

When Cas emerged, he had not bothered with a shirt, only his homespun linen pants. The chemical cocktails he rode high on these days did not last long in his system, and his sobriety had returned with food and hygiene. Dean didn’t miss the wistful glance toward the cabinet where he kept the shine.

“Do you have plans tonight?” Cas managed to ask the question without a hint of vulnerability. 

“Nope.” Dean reloaded the gun.

“What time do you report to interrogate the newest demons?”

“0600.”

“So morning.” Castiel met his gaze, and when he spoke again, his voice was so gentle it made Dean’s stomach hurt. “Want me to stay here?”

Dean wanted to be gruff, wanted to keep both hands on the exterior he had cultivated; he feared it might drift away if he let go. He wanted to let survival mode be his only mode, but instead, he nodded wordlessly.

Castiel understood. He walked over to the door and locked it, moved to the windows to methodically latch each one and close the blinds, and finally, he flicked off the cabin’s only bare lightbulb. Before his eyes could adjust to the dark, Dean felt Castiel fill the space in front of him, kneeling on the floor before his chair.

“Dean.”

And just like that, with one little word, Dean Winchester slipped from the cold, heavy shell he carried all day and revealed only himself. The exhaustion oozed out from its hiding places to flood his insides. 

He let Cas put his hands on his knees, leaned forward to press their foreheads together. They breathed the same air, and Dean ached with a thousand pains. Castiel was the only one who knew. Sammy, Bobby, Ellen, Jo… all of them had been quicksilver in his fingers, gone in an instant. 

Cas was all he had left, but more than that, Cas was the only one who shared the memories with him. Castiel was the only person left in the world besides him who knew their names. Dean need only say the word and Cas would talk about them, breathe life into their memories. How long had it been since anyone had said Sam’s name to him? How long had it been since even he had dared?

“Let me.” Castiel’s words, both question and command, were undeniable. He reached for Dean’s pants, unbuckled his belt. Dean lifted his hips obligingly, let Cas pull his pants down to his ankles, even though he hung limp. Castiel took him in his hand, curving his fingers around the shaft and his thumb over the head. There was no insistence in the touch. He stroked gently, without urgency. Dean imagined his own tiredness, black and dull, rearing up to fight arousal, red and desperate.

He hardened under Castiel’s knowing touch. Dean leaned back in the chair, closed his eyes, reveled in the sensation. When Cas slid his thumb along the underside of the head, an edge of fingernail just adding bite to the pleasure, Dean heard himself groan.

When finally the heady arousal had beaten back the tiredness, he groped out into the darkness for Cas, cupping his cheeks and pulling them together. They kissed without self-consciousness or hesitation, irreverent in their abandon. Dean wound his hand in Cas’s hair, tugged his head backwards to offer up deeper access to his mouth, roved with his tongue, breathed in without leaning back to fill his lungs with air from Cas’s.

He drank in the sensation even as his hips bucked with the stroking of his dick. When a moan rolled along their mouths and rattled the kiss, he didn’t know whose it was. Nor did he know who led who as they started their journey toward the bedroom. The dirty mattress on the floor had borne their weight many, many times; keeping score no longer mattered. Dean kicked his pants from around his ankles at the door as he reached for Cas’s.

“Wait.” Castiel shook his head, breaking the kiss. Even in the dark, Dean could see the impossible blue. He squeezed his eyes shut for an instant as if he could hide from the seeing gaze. “I’m not done.”

In an instant, he had Dean flat on his back, kneeling once more between his legs. The subservient posture served a double purpose; as Cas wanted, it reminded Dean that he was here for him, following his command, but it also gave Dean a heady, intoxicating buzz as Castiel set to work. Nothing could be sexier than those eyes glowing up at him. Cas tipped his head and pulled in the fullness of Dean’s erection, slowly, taking each millimeter individually until Dean bucked to the sensation, driving himself deeper. Castiel gagged and then moaned. The two sounds in unison nearly undid Dean.

Cas’s mouth lingered and rushed: long, smooth strokes, languid swirls around the shaft, and then deep, eager sucking, blowing Dean up until he was helpless against him, fucking the mouth that fucked him.

He came with a ferocious groan, taken by the pulsing around him as Castiel swallowed in two rapid pulls.

The afterglow did not last. As he lay, spent, satisfied, his brain seized the opening, and the thought of what he had just done – had done so many times before – turned his stomach. Unfairly, he wanted to look at Castiel and say, “What happened to you, man?”

But he didn’t have the courage because he knew the truth. If Castiel pulled no punches and answered honestly, the answer would be, “I followed you.” The angel had been doomed the second he threw his lot in with the man so arrogant he had tried to stop the Apocalypse. Dean remembered meeting Cas. The image had seared itself into his brain, and in moments like this, it could not be unseen: tall, black-winged, fierce. He had been one of Heaven’s mightiest warriors.

Now he was walking out to the kitchen to wash semen down with moonshine and quaaludes.

An apology stung on Dean’s mouth even as he rolled onto his hip and waited for Cas to return.

 

\-------------------

 

“Why are you awake?” Dean asked the question lightly, running his fingers along Castiel’s chest. He watched the satisfying ripple of goosebumps rising to his touch.

“I can’t sleep.”

Dean didn’t ride him for pointing out the obvious. “Yeah. Why?”

“I need to tell you something.”

The words dropped like lead weights into Dean’s stomach, sending the bilious anxiety ever higher to the surface, but he hid the emotional reaction in bark. He rolled over, holding his body along the edge of the mattress where he could not feel Castiel beside him.

“Then tell me. Don’t wake me up with a bunch of fucking tossing and turning when I’ve got interrogation to do bright and early in the morning.” 

“Torture,” Castiel clarified, reworded, and for one instant, Dean hated him. Did he think Dean didn’t realize that he heated long metal rods over the fire and then rammed them into human orifices? Did he think somehow Dean had failed to notice when the demons slid into the subconscious and the meatsuit in front of him became human, screaming and begging? Did he really think Dean forgot all of that just because he chose to use a nicer word? He used the nicer word for Cas, to keep Cas from having to think about how far Dean had fallen. 

He would have appreciated it if Castiel had shown him a little of the same courtesy in return.

“Yeah.” Dean offered no further answer. 

“We can talk in the morning.” 

When Dean rolled back over, Cas had already gotten up. Dean listened to the swish of the moonshine in its glass jug, heard the rattle of the pill bottle, and after a few minutes, a deep, satisfied sigh.

Dean spread out over the whole mattress again. Castiel wouldn’t be back tonight. 

 

\----------------------------

 

“They…” The kid in front of Dean couldn’t be more than sixteen years old, decked out in oversized camo and looking scared shitless. “They…” This time, he swallowed hard, straightened his back, and got his words out. “It was a rough night here last night, sir.”

“What’s your name?” Dean knew he needed to add a kindness – kid or son or buddy, something – but it stuck in his throat.

“Noah, sir. Noah Clark.”

He remembered the name from a recent roster list, one of a set of new faces around here. “I’m guessing this was your first rotation.” 

“Yes sir.”

Dean could have cussed Rissa up one side of the camp and down another for putting this greenhorn on demons for his first rotation. Sure, the devil’s traps were concrete, poured into the floor itself, so physically, this guard duty was the safest one, but mentally, there was none harder. He could only imagine the filth Noah had heard, stationed here overnight.

“It doesn’t get easier. Demons are nasty business.”

One of the voices from inside drifted to them, female and familiar. “Aw, Dean, and here I thought we were on the same side. After all, we both wanted humans to get to fight the Apocalypse on their own bloody terms.” 

This time, Noah jutted out his chin, a sliver of pride showing through his fear. “I know that, sir. That’s how we lost our parents.”

Dean nodded, unwilling to ask and hear yet another heartbreaking story. “Well go get some sleep. You survived your first one.”

“Yes sir.” Noah was gone in a flash. 

Dean worked his way through the layers of the makeshift building through two sets of padlocked iron bars. The heavy security materials were designed to comfort the people of the camp more than anything. It was the supernatural protections – the salt and the Solomon’s – that actually kept the demons at bay. 

When he stepped into the bay, he recognized her instantly. When the other team brought her in, they could not have known the history. There was no way they could have marked this on their report. Meg grinned.

“Hey there, Dean-o. How’s Sammy?” 

Dean thanked God for his own soullessness as he wheeled his cart, a makeshift old hospital roller, from the corner of the room. He sharpened the knives, dropped a stack of needles into the jar of holy water, and reapplied sticky salt to his brass knuckles. He ignored her behind him as he worked.

“I’m kidding, of course. You don’t know how Sammy is. You must be dying to ask me though. I see him all the time. Of course, he doesn’t have much of his own to say these days.”

He laid out his wares in a row, mentally made a plan.

“Not that many of you humans have much to say these days. These are truly the end times. I heard a pastor in Wichita say that before I ate him. I liked the ring of it. End times. The beginning of a whole new world.”

Dean settled on a sharp, thin meat fork. He dipped it in the holy water, touched it to the salt, and then approached. For the first time, the snarky confidence on Meg’s face flickered. Her eyes changed to their true black, and though her voice did not change, he knew he had surprised her.

“Don’t you know anything about interrogation, big bro? You’re supposed to ask me a question.”

He felt his mouth curve up at the corner, a ghostly half-smile.

“Who says this is an interrogation, bitch?”

The fork through her vocal cords rendered her first scream soundless.

 

\------------------------

 

Castiel checked off another item on his clipboard, a blunt tucked behind his ear, shoeless, in front of the supply station when Dean came blasting up. Chuck and Vince turned in surprise at the pounding footfalls, but Cas didn’t look up. 

“I need to talk to you.” Dean pushed the words through his gritted teeth. Neither Chuck nor Vince seemed to think, for even a second, that Dean was talking to them, but Castiel reacted slowly. He seemed to swim through the air as he turned, a slow, loopy smile emerging on his face.

“Hello Dean.”

“Headquarters now.” Dean spun on his heel and stalked to the cabin used for main operations. As he crossed the camp, he felt, rather than saw, the reactions to his anger. People scurried out of his way, and not for the first time, he recognized his own mythological status. He had knowledge of demons and Croatoan before the world ever fell apart. To the survivors here, he represented hope. If they knew that he didn’t believe any of them could make it out of this alive, it would break their hearts.

He let the door of the cabin bang shut behind him. The walls were hung with maps, photographs, and pushpins, the tables draped with meteorological charts and crop data. The whole operation hinged on his organizational style, taught at the hip of John Winchester. Rissa sat at the table, working on the duty schedule, and even though Dean had spent more than one night balls-deep inside her, he snapped at her to get out.

“Excuse me?” She jerked her head up from her work, offended, but then saw his face. 

“If you find room on the schedule, you could send Chuck in to clean up the lockdown.”

“Okay.” Then even Rissa, strong-jawed, no-tears-and-no-fears Rissa, hurried away from his anger.

Castiel sauntered in, smoking his joint, looking for all the world like anyone but himself. Dean hated him like this: stoned, stupid, so low on the human totem pole that he barely qualified. This version of Castiel deserved all the anger Dean could throw at him. It was this version who had created this new mess.

“You rang?” Castiel giggled.

“You want to tell me that something you’ve been needing to tell me?” Dean levelled him with his gaze. “Can you even remember it when you’re stoned?”

Castiel didn’t have the decency to look ashamed. “Whoa. You’re really angry.”

Dean grabbed his sidearm, pulled the pistol out and lined it up with Castiel’s head. His took aim. His gaze followed the imaginary line from his forearm to the gun to the spot right between Cas’s eyes. 

“Tell me I shouldn’t,” Dean said.

Cas laughed again, this time low and soft and ironic. “You need me, Righteous Man. We’re Team Free Will.”

“I’d put a dog down if he was like this. Tell me it wouldn’t be a mercy killing to put a bullet through your brain.”

Castiel didn’t reply. Instead he sat down in one of the chairs, tossed his boots up on the table. 

Dean didn’t move the gun, even though it was no longer trained on Cas. “You need to tell me what you did.”

“You already know.” 

“I want to hear you say it, you son of a bitch.”

Castiel leaned back in the chair. “I let the demon go.”

And that was exactly what Meg had confessed, half of her intestines out on the table, her throat full of holes and salt. She had sputtered out that the top demon brass wasn’t full of new tricks or strength. The last high-ranking member of Satan’s fan club hadn’t escaped. He had been set free by Castiel, Angel of the Lord. Dean had ganked her, watched the light flash out in reds and yellows, but she hadn’t been lying. No rank-and-file demon lied to Dean Winchester with his instruments of torture in his hands. Hadn’t he been trained by their master?

Yet now, hearing it from Castiel bottomed out his insides. His rage evaporated and left him with nothing to hold onto.

He ended up staring at Cas, silent and hollow, until his watch dinged 16:00. As he walked out the door, the shattered remains of their trust rattled in his stomach like broken glass, slicing him up and spilling bile everywhere. 

 

\-----------------------

 

Everyone knew Dean and Castiel were connected. Maybe no one tried too hard to understand it --surviving took precedence over interpersonal crap -- but no one got to be a survivor in 2013 by being stupid. Everyone could see the balancing act their leader faced. On one hand, he wanted Castiel on the missions, at his side, and on the other hand, he wanted to keep him safe. Plus most of them knew Castiel was… different. Dean operated the entire camp on a need-to-know basis, and he apparently thought no one needed to know jackshit about Castiel, but still, they could tell. Something about him wasn’t entirely… right. 

But they knew not to challenge it. Challenging Castiel meant challenging Dean, and that sure as hell wasn’t worth it. Dean was their only way out of this mess. He was the man for the job.

But that didn’t mean the others on the 16:00 retrieval mission didn’t get nervous when Dean drove the Bronco himself and Castiel had to hitch a ride further back in the convoy.

They got even more nervous when they split into two teams to flank the hot zone, and Dean didn’t include Castiel on his team. 

Then Castiel wasn’t given command of the second team, and everyone just pretended this change in the natural order of things didn’t scare the fuck out of them.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of the _Infinity of Us_ series. The series showcases a series of oneshots for Destiel might-have-beens.


End file.
